


Barbican

by Duckface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 01:57:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1208575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duckface/pseuds/Duckface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little poem about what's owed</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barbican

Nepeta sits on the Barbican and she's kicking her feet and she's only ten and they didn't know what to do with her then, so she slipped away in the ducts - and as far as we knew and as far as they know she never changed and she doesn't grow and the place is real big so who's to know if her luck held out or what

Her mom cashed in at the big cave-in in the dodgy squat by the parking lot and she never came out, and that's all she wrote, so Nepeta dug out her mom's old coat and she wore the ears and she faced her fears and she learned that pigeon tastes fine with tears, and a growing bod needs salt and blood but she didn't grow much and she played in the mud 

And the Barbican's big and you pay big rent but nobody knows where the key ring went and the place was built in the 70s so there's places to go on your hands and knees where the grownups aren't and there's kitchens to raid and the sunny spots on the esplanade and the brutal plots of the girls brigade from the private school - they aren't that cruel - tin cans on the tail and rats in the gruel but the joke is rats are good for you

And the boy whose blood was curacao blue found her hiding spot and he broke her in two metaphorically (metafurrically) but a lot of real things got broken too and he saw she was brown and she barely spoke but he bought her a tablet that always broke and he bought her a book and he told her a joke - the only one that he knew

And he was the only who knew so long that it seemed like it couldn't be true, and all of her clothes were gone then new and the years built of seasons were one and then two and the miserable fact that mired her heart: she was getting too big to fit in the dark and the hours that stretched were just more time apart and they sent him to boarding school

And one rainy night she couldn't stay hid and remembered the sum of the things that they did the windows that broke and the fireworks hid and the theft of the iPhone jammed under the lid of the dumpster that never went through - she panicked and thought if she gave him a call he could loosen the pall but the black and white's spotlight nailed her to the wall and the clown with the badge had a club in his hand so the pounce was short-lived and the night came in

And when he returned it was with lessons learned and his one vanished friend could fit neatly within the new way that the world could be comfortably furled within a glass case amid systems of place - and his destiny beckoned, and memory slackened, and after a time when he walked down the back-end and trod the old pathways that she'd led him down then, he thought he had found them himself - with a friend? With a shadow, imagined, a meaningless sign, and no-one knew why he was mad all the time

Nepeta is sitting in Abakaliki on top of a roundabout. There are two roads and she knows them by heart. The people who say that she looks like her mother did not know her mother, don't know where to start, and don't know the part of her waiting in water, the part which remains absolutely apart. Nepeta has grown but the world has grown smaller-this town and these people are not hers to take. Theft answers theft, and her heart's owed the Barbican. She'll find his number then.

All the lawyers in this world

Protect the neck of the boy and girl

All of the guards and the border patrol

Won't save the boy from his friend


End file.
